The astonishing story of America’s airwaves, the two friends—one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor—who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air.This is the origin story of the airwaves—the foundational technology of the communications age—as told through the forty-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor.David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.

Sarnoff was convinced that Armstrong’s inventions had the power to change the way societies communicated with each other forever. He would become a visionary captain of the media industry, even predicting the advent of the Internet.In the mid-1930s, however, when Armstrong suspected Sarnoff of orchestrating a cadre of government officials to seize control of the FM airwaves, he committed suicide. Sarnoff had a very different view of who his friend’s enemies were.Many corrupt politicians and corporations saw in Armstrong’s inventions the opportunity to commodify our most ubiquitous natural resource—the air. This early alliance between high tech and business set the precedent for countless legal and industrial battles over broadband and licensing bandwidth, many of which continue to influence policy and debate today.

How do books, newspapers, music recordings, movies, television shows, and online sites get made? How does content in different media get funded, produced and delivered to the right audiences? Why do certain materials and not others get created and distributed in different media? What role do governments (federal, state, local) play in the process? (This book) addresses these and related questions with concrete examples from a wide variety of mass media – from books to cable television, highway billboards to online services.

The text tracks, among other developments, the explosion of competition among new and old media, pressures toward greater and greater conglomeratization among media firms, the need to increasing segment audiences, and their obligation to expand global sales. Students need to understand what is happening, why, and with what possible consequences for society.

In less than a decade, the Internet went from being a series of loosely connected networks used by universities and the military to the powerful commercial engine it is today. This book describes how many of the key innovations that made this possible came from entrepreneurs and iconoclasts who were outside the mainstream–and how the commercialization of the Internet was by no means a foregone conclusion at its outset.Shane Greenstein traces the evolution of the Internet from government ownership to privatization to the commercial Internet we know today.

This is a story of innovation from the edges. Greenstein shows how mainstream service providers that had traditionally been leaders in the old-market economy became threatened by innovations from industry outsiders who saw economic opportunities where others didn’t–and how these mainstream firms had no choice but to innovate themselves. New models were tried: some succeeded, some failed. Commercial markets turned innovations into valuable products and services as the Internet evolved in those markets. New business processes had to be created from scratch as a network originally intended for research and military defense had to deal with network interconnectivity, the needs of commercial users, and a host of challenges with implementing innovative new services.How the Internet Became Commercial demonstrates how, without any central authority, a unique and vibrant interplay between government and private industry transformed the Internet.

The Music Business and Recording Industry is a comprehensive music business textbook focused on the three income streams in the music industry: music publishing, live entertainment, and recordings. The book provides a sound foundation for understanding key issues, while presenting the latest research in the field. It covers the changes in the industry brought about by the digital age, such as changing methods of distributing and accessing music and new approaches in marketing with the Internet and mobile applications.

New developments in copyright law are also examined, along with the global and regional differences in the music business.

This book examines how we can conceive of a â€˜postcolonial museumâ€™ in the contemporary epoch of mass migrations, the internet and digital technologies. The authors consider the museum space, practices and institutions in the light of repressed histories, sounds, voices, images, memories, bodies, expression and cultures. Focusing on the transformation of museums as cultural spaces, rather than physical places, is to propose a living archive formed through creation, participation, production and innovation.

The aim is to propose a critical assessment of the museum in the light of those transcultural and global migratory movements that challenge the historical and traditional frames of Occidental thought. This involves a search for new strategies and critical approaches in the fields of museum and heritage studies which will renew and extend understandings of European citizenship and result in an inevitable re-evaluation of the concept of â€˜modernityâ€™ in a so-called globalised and multicultural world.

This short handbook collects essays on all aspects of the motion picture industry by leading authorities in political economy, economics, accounting, finance, and marketing. In addition to bringing the reader an up-to-date perspective on what is known and what has been accomplished, it includes both new findings on a variety of topics and directions for additional research. Topics include estimation of theatrical and ancillary demand, profitability studies, the resolution of evident paradoxes in studio executive behavior, the interaction of the industry and government, the impacts of the most recent changes in accounting standards, and the role and importance of participation contracts.

New results include findings on the true nature of the seasonality of theatrical demand, the predictive power of surveys based upon trailers, the impact of the Academy Awards, the efectiveness of prior history measures to gauge cast members and directors, and the substitutability of movies across different genres.